Ron walks through and scans the area. She hasn’t been this way before and frankly, she kind of thought that the town only had a row of buildings around one main road. But now, she can see that there are two more roads back here—a larger one that’s parallel to the main road, and a narrow one that leads from where she is and cuts through the bigger road at a diagonal to the right. The buildings are more sparse and disorganized here, like they were built wherever the owners pleased and then they tried to make roads later.
The streets are empty and many of the houses here don’t have any lights on, so it’s significantly darker.
Their talking sounds like it’s coming from straight ahead, rather than to the sides of her, so she heads up the diagonal road as carefully, but also as quickly, as possible.
Just as she reaches where the diagonal and big roads intersect, she hears a door slamming and the talking stops. She stops too, straining to hear something else. All she can hear is the distant sound of a TV running in a house somewhere nearby.
The talking doesn’t start up again. Did they go inside?
She continues up the diagonal road, where it gets even darker. Holding her breath, she walks up the entire road, which only takes a couple minutes. It ends at the forest, which surrounds the town. Releasing her breath, she looks around. Where could they have gone? This small road only holds two houses, one on each side of the road, but both of the lights are off and she doesn’t see Carl’s motorcycle anywhere.
“Stop it!” a man’s voice screamed from somewhere in front of Ron. It was muffled but it sounds like it came from the forest.
Ron peers into the forest. There isn’t any visible trail but she thinks she sees a light up ahead. She puts her foot out, feeling the ground to make sure she can step there and enters the forest.
Her heart pounds in her chest as she approaches the light, every crunchy leaf and snappy twig she steps on making her stop in her tracks. She hopes no one is outside because if someone is, they’d hear her coming from a mile away.
Finally, she reaches a small, square log cabin. The light coming from the windows is dim and yellow, like candlelight perhaps. Parked in front is Carl’s motorcycle. How did he even get it here? Maybe he rode to the end of the diagonal road and then walked the bike through the forest, but Ron doesn’t see any obvious path that he could have taken to get here from the road.
Luckily, no one is outside, but she doesn’t hear any sounds coming from inside either.
She goes into the clearing that surrounds the cabin and creeps over to the window. It’s open. Her body against the wall, she looks in so only one eye is visible.
No one.
All she sees in the square room is a futon sofa that’s pulled out so it’s a bed, blanket and pillows strewn about messily on the futon, a tiny kitchen off to the right, and gas lanterns hanging on the walls.
“Let me go!”
It’s the same man’s voice from earlier, and very close but still a bit muffled. The desperation in it sends a chill through Ron’s spine.
She skirts the wall of the cabin and peers through the window on the adjoining wall. From here, she can see the kitchen better. There’s another window on the opposite wall in the kitchen. There isn’t a window on the wall the futon bed is leaning up against.
Ron continues around the cabin to the back. There’s light here too, coming from the ground. She walks over to it. It’s a half-buried window.
She kneels on the ground and looks inside with just half her face. It’s a basement with wires and circuits and various other bits of technology Ron doesn’t recognize all along the walls on tall shelves. In the center of the room is a mattress on the floor and someone seems to be laying in it but is covered head to toe in a thin sheet that looks like it’s supposed to be white but hasn’t been washed in years.
Dead?
No. The sheet is rising and falling where the person’s chest would be.
A hefty black cord snakes its way from under the sheet to a laptop on the table in front of the mattress. Carl is sitting in a folding chair at the table typing furiously with a large pair of white headphones on his head. The other guys are huddled around him, eyes glued to the screen and jaws dropped open.
A white bottle and soaked rag sit on the floor next to the mattress.
“What is that? Some kind of monster?” one of the guys around Carl says.
No one answers him.
Ron moves away from the window. She wants to look in again, but she knows if she does, she probably won’t stop looking. She’s already lucky no one has seen her yet. The longer she stays here, the more she risks getting caught.
She gets up and walks back to where she entered the forest. As she walks back to Iris and Giselle’s, she can’t get the image of what she saw in that basement out of her mind.
That person under the sheet. It’s probably a man since she didn’t see any breasts contouring the sheet. And earlier, those screams she heard. Who else could that have been except the sheet guy?
They’re holding someone hostage, and they knocked him out somehow. And what if that man is gifted and they’re running experiments or something on him?
In that case, Carl might not be as delusional as Ron thought.
Chapter 18
Ron wakes up to a knock on her door. She rolls over and opens the flip phone, which
